No doubt h1b is abused. Corporations use it to structurally underpay tech labor. Shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy - it hurts both domestic workers and underpays migrant labor. The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
> shame to anyone defending this abuse as some sort of pro immigration policy.
In what way is it not pro-immigration? Perhaps you mean "pro-immigrant"? In that case, your view is cogent, but I guess this just exposes that pro-immigration policy isn't necessarily good for the immigrants that it welcomes.
Immigration benefits capital. For example, as Federal Reserve Vice Chair Bowman indicated [0], immigration creates housing inflation.
It’s a dual intent visa.
The visa itself provides no immigration benefits but it’s explicitly designed to then allow for a permanent residency and then citizenship application.
> what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
None of it? The way I see it is every top tier programmer in America is already employed.
I think the inevitable outcome would just be the big multi-nationals (FAANG in particular) would just hire more in their international offices and spread out their engineering org more instead of remaining so American heavy and using immigration to centralise staffing.
There probably isn't a world where these huge companies decide to simply not take advantage of the global talent pool, if they don't exploit it someone else will and they can't have that.
Apple employees thousands of H1Bs, many of them literally push buttons and file bug reports all day and don’t know how to code or barely know how. I know this because I’ve worked with teams of them for a decade at Apple.
These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
Not disputing this, but working thru this, lets say H-1Bs suddenly become really hard for companies to get. I dont think it follows that a ton of IT jobs suddenly open up for Americans. Isnt it more likely that all those H-1B jobs are replaced by workers in offshore locations?
Or, that those jobs disappear and are not replaced at all. Or, that the jobs go and the work is expected to happen (somehow) with AI tools operated by whoever is left.
My point is, whatever you or I might think about H-1B misuse, both the people who want to keep it, and the people who want to eliminate it are not really friends of the American worker.
Many of these roles, such as the ones where people just push buttons and send emails, could be done by Americans with just a little bit of training. But there is no incentive for Apple to train Americans or invest in their existing employees when they can just claim “labor shortage” and hire someone from India instead.
We know this works already because this is how the country worked until 1990, when they created the H1B and massively increased all other types of immigration. By 1990 the US was the undisputed powerhouse of the world, and it was built completely with native born labor.
There was plenty of offshoring that happened during the 90’s but the companies that rely on it heavily do not end up winning. In the end nothing beats Americans working in America and that’s obvious just by looking at the stock market.
The people who want to eliminate the H1B are absolutely pro-worker in my opinion. It’s a tool that’s used almost exclusively to suppress wages, the quality of the workers is almost always significantly worse than the American equivalent and serves only to boost profits for the company owners at the expense of their own workers.
My point is that even if H-1B were eliminated and all the people that hold them today returned to their home countries, employers' response is less likely to be "we need to hire and train more Americans, asap" but more like "let's expand our overseas operations, so we can get work done without paying Americans".
In other words eliminating immigration like this is only half the solution of you don't also have a way to stop offshoring.
Because they are an American company which benefits from all of the advantages of this country, and indeed would not exist at all without this country's people. They rely on the tax incentives, stable society, culture, cities, infrastructure, and PEOPLE of this country. It's a company founded by Americans in the USA, they have reaped the benefits of everything that comes from this country.
Do you think that Apple could or would have been founded in India? or China? Or Brazil? Obviously not. It's obviously the product of this country.
Is your argument that since Apple makes money in other countries that they should transcend nations and become their own super-national entity? That they should not have to follow the rules or even try to benefit their home country?
At the end of the day that is what's happening. These mega corps have basically usurped the power of nations and made their own rules. They have changed the immigration system to give themselves the power to import cheap labor at the expense of the country that allowed them to exist in the first place. We as workers are saying that we should use the power of government to push back against this practice.
I think Apple benefits from the tax incentives, "stable" society, and freedoms in my country too. And it employs many people here and elsewhere around the world and there is no chance it could sell as many units as it does without those people
> These are not top tier talent type people, this is work that my mom could do, but Apple can pay much less by bringing people over from India, Pakistan, China to do this work instead of finding Americans to do it.
H1Bs are not getting approved for these for years now.
Infosys and TechM exploited the crap out of it to do shit like this which caused the rules to be tightened massively.
These days you are only getting H1B for folks atleast earning 200k+ base.
I mean you could read the linked website where it points out we aren’t talking about top tier talent. It’s just shit IT jobs we used to pay Americans to do so they could be furries. Now we pay Indians to do it so they can act like they are better than Mexicans.
Many of the top tier companies (meta, Amazon, google, microsoft etc) have had massive layoffs in the 10's of thousands range. Those workers were top tier programmers. So you need to be quite delusional or uninformed to have your view point on the work force.
Bar was lowered massively during the COVID employment boom (with the exception of Apple really).
Unfortunately resetting the bar has massive collateral damage but it will sort itself out pretty quickly.
All the good ones will be re-employed within short order. The ones that the layoffs were trying to flush out with said layoffs will transition out of FAANG into lower-tier employers.
They are rewarded for cutting the budget, and undercutting domestic workers. Until that changes, this problem will continue. Or workers could unionize.
As with many systemic issues in the U.S., it boils down to "publicly traded company must have highest profit possible so line on chart goes up". As much as I dislike FAANG companies in general for all their anti-worker efforts, I can't honestly blame them for making decisions that look good on the balance sheet. If I am a company, and I can choose to hire 10 U.S. engineers for $200k a pop, or 10 H-1B engineers for $100k a pop, I'm going to pick the H-1B engineers. Every H-1B or green card engineer I've worked with in-office has been extremely skilled, so I wouldn't even feel like I was "getting what I paid for" hiring them over U.S. citizens.
You mudt have gotten lucky with your coworkers. Ive worked with people who claimed to be “experts” in a domain that didnt have basic skills. I would say 5% were excellent, 5% good. 90% worthless. Coupled with weird insular cultural dynamics, poor english and communication skills, poor throw it over the wall mentality. Its overalll a huge net negative for a company. Perhaps its different in FAANG. But in enterprise companies its very bad.
As time goes on I'm finding AWS on a resume less and less impressive, regardless of citizenship status. Lots of resumes where they were at AWS for 1 or 2 years, I guess they got stack-ranked out. It makes sense. Everyone knows AWS is a revolving door.
I heard the average tenure for an SDE at amazon is something like 9 months. The culture is so repulsive that if you're good you leave soon and convert that big name on your CV to something better. I know a few really good ex AWS engineers and the thing in common is they hate Amazon and will rant about how dumb the culture is.
If there is a correlation to company size or company popularity (e.g., FAANG) I would have actually thought it would be large companies/FAANG are hiring the low-quality H-1Bs. I usually work at medium sized companies (50-200 engineers company-wide is my definition) where maybe 2-4% of the engineers are H-1B or green card. They've all been great. Even the one at Allstate (Allstate was also hugely reliant on India-based Infosys "developers" who I will yell from the mountaintops were straight garbage and very much net-negative).
And that's exactly why managers keep hiring them. If you're a defensive manager who just wants to keep your head down and grind out the years before moving getting a "senior" or "principal" manager job somewhere else then a bunch of compliant workers who'll punt anything messy onto some other team is exactly what you want.
I've heard anecdotally that Stryker is really bad about this (throw it over the wall mentality) and I remember thinking when I heard that, how the fuck are employees of a company getting away with being assigned work and just reassigning it to someone else? But then I think about my Allstate days and I can see it. I think you're being downvoted because people reading your comment haven't witnessed that sort of dysfunction in a company, but to anyone reading this- it is how some companies operate. The execs at these companies will deadass hire garbage people (usually offshore) and then brag about how much money they saved the company vs hiring U.S. citizens. Either the bill comes due years down the road when prod goes down due to a bullshit bug from the offshore team and it ends up costing the company millions, or U.S. employees are picking up the slack.
At Allstate (circa 2016), we were required to use offshore teams from Infosys. There was one U.S. software engineer for every 6 or so offshore "engineers". We weren't allowed to say "no they actually cause more problems than they fix, you can keep paying them but we'll be paying them to do nothing". Ha. You would have gotten fired for that level of "insubordination" because the higher ups legitimately didn't understand that software development is a skill - it's not like an assembly line where anyone can put an item into a box over and over again.
> The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.
I would challenge that by saying SO MANY "software engineers" are net-negative producers, be it offshore teams in Asia or Eastern Europe or U.S. citizens. Partially a result of coding bootcamps. The recent tech layoffs in ~2022 that we are still reeling from is further evidence that maybe we don't need H-1B for software engineering roles. Medical? Absolutely.
You are being downvoted but you are totally correct. The tech industry existed before the H1B and was growing rapidly. There’s no evidence at all that the industry would have stopped growing without the H1B or that any company started by an H1B wouldn’t have been started by an American.
44% of unicorns founders between 1997 and 2019 were foreign born. 20% of those were specifically from India.
It seems like if Americans were just so much more dominant, they’d form a much higher percentage of unicorn founders given that the percentage of foreign born people in the US was about 15% at the highest.
Looks like foreign born immigrants are punching about 3 times their weight as startup founders.
Employees get options at common stock prices. The valuations you see, like $12bn, are for preferred stock. So no employees got stock priced at $12bn, but all of them get paid at a $5.15bn valuation.
Not saying they did well, but depending on the 409a valuations, they still might have made money.
Edit: friends, if you’re going to downvote please leave a comment as to why. It’s okay to disagree! There’s a lot of misleading FUD in these discussions about equity. It’s helpful for everyone to hear those sides.
Their options should be priced lower, but the common stock isn't valued according to the $5.15B. They raised $300M at $12B and $425M at $7.4B, which are both under water, so those shareholders will use their liquidation preference to get paid at least 1x. Assuming those rounds owned 7% of the company, there is at most $4.4B left for the remaining 93% of shareholders. That's about 8% less. If they deducted fees, legal services, or retention packages or had worse liquidation preferences or more underwater rounds, then it gets even lower.
More specifically, when employees are granted options contracts the strike price of those contracts is based on the last valuation of the company prior to the grant. If all is going well and the valuation is increasing those options are also increasing in value. Here we have a sale which values the company lower than the prior valuation. Recent option grants will likely be underwater, earlier grants would still be profitable.
> The valuations you see, like $12bn, are for preferred stock.
No, the valuation is for the whole company, all of its shares, preferred and common. How this value is distributed among shareholders depends on the deal, but generally there is a “seniority”, roughly: creditors (debt holders) are paid first, preferred shares next, then common shareholders last. This order can be negotiated as part of the sale.
> So no employees got stock priced at $12bn, but all of them get paid at a $5.15bn valuation.
It’s just not possible to know what each individual employee’s outcome is. We don’t know how much of that 5.5 billion will be left over for common shareholders including the employees. Note that employees have received salaries so their overall outcome is greater than zero dollars, but perhaps their total compensation outcome is lower than they hoped for the time they put in.
> Not saying they did well, but depending on the 409a valuations, they still might have made money.
Yes, some might have and some might have not. We just don’t know without more details.
Edit: singron’s answer (sibling comment) attempts to model the employee outcome in a rough but reasonable way.
The way they get to $12.5bn is multiplying the preferred share price by the total outstanding shares. But the common shares, while still included in that calculation, are not worth the same amount of money.
They have a different strike price for options that is set via a 409a.
It’s possible that employees got, at the peak, grants with strike prices at a $2bn 409a valuation. We don’t know. What we do know is that no employee ever got grants with a strike price of a $12.5bn valuation. That’s just not how this works.
wow.. this is cool. what's the endgame? I built a site that logs my lifetime in person attendance along with statcast tracking for homeruns, launch angle and more. wonder if theres some crossover
https://baseball.willbaxter.info/
The endgame is to become the ultimate source of truth regarding the quality of a sports game.
Dreaming big with hopes of becoming a household name similar to imdb or letterboxd.
Looking at your site I think you would like to hear that when rating games you can mark a game as 'attended', 'watched' or other categories to show others how you experienced the game or just for your own personal log.
Other than that we are light on classic sports stats and our stats are more focused on the user ratings of the games rather than the game stats.
Nice. I've played around with this idea a bit. How do you handle the data and what do story+comment section prompts look like? Do you take the source material in for story generation?
Perhaps there is a lot of money you could get in short term. Enough to pay the costs and generate some profit.
Also, most people are not computer experts; if you show them something can be done using your website, they will continue to do it using your website long after others have added the same functionality.
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